lexpar

"Given any input string, the sensitivity of that string is how many bits you could flip that cause the output to flip."

The sensitivity of that string is the minimum number of bits that need to be changed in order to change the output?

Not being snarky - just want to see if I understand. The phrase "how many bits you could flip" is ambiguous.

For the record, I didn't down vote you (I don't even have enough HN cool-points to do so).

I was responding more to the callous nature of your comment than whether or not current warming trends are an absolute existential threat.

The trade offs get really funny.

If we think it's really the case that most wild animals will perish in the climate upheaval, then doesn't that change the math a bit on how much risk we should be willing to accept when it comes to climate engineering? If the wealthiest humans could probably adapt to +5c, but a billion poorer ones would die, how much does that change the math?

Personally I'd be willing to accept quite a lot of risk to avoid these awful outcomes.

AFAIK the plans to put sulfur into the stratosphere are modeled on exactly what a volcano does, i.e. a natural process. Of course it could turn out bad, but it doesn't sound to me like a totally out-of-bounds idea.

Maybe someone with a better background could tell me otherwise? I only know about computers.

I really hope you'll change your mind, specifically about that last sentence. Probably billions of the world's poorest people are likely to see their environment become unlivable. That's not a problem a little AC and migration will easily solve.

Just look how poorly rich countries are reacting to the current levels of migration from less rich countries.

I meant there's an "infomercial" tone to a lot of the docs, (claiming the other ways are broken, a list of testimonials, etc).

I think it's a bit odd. I wasn't trying to say that good documentation makes me suspicious, but this very heavy handed advertising up front does.

I know it's partly a joke, but it's not just one ore two lines.

You can make any amount of money seem small by saying "well the top {1,0.1,0.001}% of people make that in a month".

Maybe you're right that it's a bit naive to throw money at internet eccentrics who don't have a plan and trust that they will manage things well.

I just don't think we should be excusing things because it's (what some people think) is a small amount of money (note - about the average yearly income for a Canadian).

> The amount of money is ridiculously small. It isn't worth the time to focus on it.

Well, it's donated money... Do you think the people who donated share this view?

Reitz really does not come off looking very good here.

I was always a little suspicious of the set of libraries he maintains - the documentation pages are so slick that I begin to wonder if this is a software package or a lifestyle upgrade.

Anecdotally, I was at one point in an informal business relationship with someone who has bipolar disorder and I had a very similar experience when I attempted to formalize our procedures for collecting and recording income. This was in a band (garage bands seemingly not that different from OSS) - so we're talking a few hundred dollars a month going in to one person's checking account. I thought we'd all feel better if we knew exactly how much money we were making and how it was being spent. Had a similar set of objections from my colleague to this kind of openness.

That's really cynical, but I kind of believe it.

We are thankful for SSC.

pointing out a pattern of strange behavior != denying scientific consensus.

I don't live in a city with a smog problem, and this is not my area of expertise. I was just clarifying what I thought @dsfyu404ed was saying, since it seemed to me that @lm28469 had taken it out of context and jumped to a nasty reply that wasn't really pertinent to what was being claimed.

Not sure how to reply to you directly @welearndnothing, I think we reached max depth?

I don't live in a city with a smog problem, and this is not my area of expertise. I was just clarifying what I thought @dsfyu404ed was saying, since it seemed to me that @lm28469 had taken it out of context and jumped to a nasty reply that wasn't really pertinent to what was being claimed.

What's the deal with the over the top misanthropy we see in so many people with an environmental cause? Is it a cultural thing?

Maybe it comes off as kind of edgy. Or maybe they're enjoying a preemptive "I told you so - idiots!" victory lap.

This attitude does not make me take your point seriously. It sets off my ideologue detector.

I think their point was that technological advancements have 'solved' the problem of smog in the cities that have the legal and physical infrastructure (i.e. developed) to implement the solutions. They did not seem to be saying that pollution is someone else's fault.

I worked a bit to integrate Gravity payments at a SAAS company I worked for a few years ago.

Aside from the technical aspects, I was struck by how much "Dan Price!" there was in everything I read. Here we have some more.

I think this whole 70k a year thing has been very clever. The guy is getting millions of dollars of publicity for giving about half the company a modest raise...

Not criticizing the guy - he seems kind. And whatever the personal gain he gets from this, he's acting as a "rising tide" here.

This comment is mind boggling to me. Both the fact that you've only tasted this cheese once, and that you thought it was plain!

Something like this would have indeed saved us a lot of time in the long run. Oh well.

The protocol buffers stuff seems pretty cool. At my last job (small web dev shop), we had constant headaches over the class definitions of endpoints changing and some js file not having its model updated to correspond. I thought we should be writing XML files that both ends could be reading in - we never got up the political will to make that big change though.

https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

Me and a friend put together this basic idea a few years ago at a hackathon. At the time we thought it was very funny to code something so useless (no offense to OP). Looks like we missed out on some sweet HN karma!

https://github.com/AFFogarty/QRTransfer

You say "without considering accidents", but I'd argue that accidents are usually negligible to begin with. Yes there were the "big" incidents early in the history of nuclear power, but besides being huge public relation disasters, these disasters are not so "big" compared to other energy production accidents (e.g. offshore drilling, mining, etc).

Yes 100% solar/wind would be virtually accident free, but if you argue this point too hard you let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

I always like to point out to people (it often surprises them) that the province of Ontario gets more than half of its energy from nuclear plants [1]. How often do you hear about horrible accidents in Ontario? Not so often - there hasn't been a major clean up required since the mid 90s. And these are facilities built in the 60s! Anecdotal, but this is the sort of "quiet evidence" of nuclear safety that is easy to ignore.

[1] https://www.ontario.ca/document/2017-long-term-energy-plan-d...

Reading this, I was unaware that nanovms.com is a website trying to sell me cloud services and not simply some blogging service.

As a spoiler to any who came here first: the post ends with an advertisement for what the author wants to sell you.

The Montreal bagel is no joke.

I would like to chime in that I also very much enjoy L-Theanine. In addition to (I think) helping me focus, it has an even more pronounced effect on anxiety. When I take L-Theanine and have some obtrusive thought -- cooked up especially to make me anxious by some adversarial force deep in my sub conscious -- I can pretty easily let it go. Most noticeably, the strong 'pit in the stomach' feeling that both signals and reinforces anxiety is absent.

I would encourage nearly anyone to try it. It's an amino acid found in the highest concentrations in green tea. If you've ever had a couple cups of green tea and noticed you feel relaxed and focused, you might want to try an L-Theanine supplement.

Can't overstate how great his stuff is.

Just looked at the video, the 'as you type' updated stack info is actually pretty cool. I thought based on the description that it only printed the contents of the stack after a command was executed. This is much nicer.

You guys are right, I didn't realise it was this cool, and I was too quick to be cynical.

Not sure if OP is author, but if you are, just to inform you, there is a small typo in this paragraph:

"Unfortunately, none of tehse protections address the cost of matching a single path element of a single file name. In 2005, CVE-2005-0256 was issued for a DoS vulnerability in WU-FTPD 2.6.2, because it ran for a very long time finding even a single match during:"

Very informative article. Thanks for it!

I don't understand why things like this get posted to HN so often. This kind of program is a very common exercise in university courses and appears in countless programming books. Heck, you implemented it in C, and this exact exercise appears in K&R C.

I hope this doesn't come off as snide... I just don't understand why the author would think this is something worth showing off.

I don't think the author 'intentionally' picked it. Like all the other graphics in the presentation, it looks to have been sourced from somewhere else.

Edit: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

All the graphics come from the above, and no mention of the original article it was taken from. Nice.